Sunday, 8 April 2012

Beg pardon to any not interested in me bringing this forward from comments here to a post. Anonymous honoured my post regarding the PB fallout with the following:

AnonymousApr 7, 2012 12:26 AM

"Why? Because it is my prerogative to not accept that I must stay quietly in place and accommodate someone who can look me in the eye and tell me that I, and any womb possessing human of a certain fertility, shouldn't mind if our bodies and lives are *debated* over cocktales as being *unworthy* of autonomy, by authoritarian, lying, anti-evidence, theocracy-pandering plutocrats who smugly know that whatever prescriptive law exists, exists for the 'little people', which of course, aren't them."

wow...exaggerating much?

I replied (among others)

NilesApr 7, 2012 01:09 PM

Doubting Anonymous:

Simple answer to a simple question: nope.

If you feel my statement is exaggeration, share your reasons as to why you believe so

Anonymous was civil enough not to just be a drive-by commentor. Presuming it was the same anonymous.

AnonymousApr 7, 2012 11:50 PM

well, do you honestly think that everyone in the anti-choice movement are "....authoritarian, lying, anti-evidence, theocracy-pandering plutocrats who smugly know that whatever prescriptive law exists, exists for the 'little people', which of course, aren't them."? Perhaps that isn't what you meant, but that's what I took away from itIt was when I got caught up in responding that I hoped no one would mind if I upped the conversation to the front page. So, here is my response and other contemplation.

Doubting Anonymous:

Please point out to me where I said *everyone* in the anti-choice movement was as my quoted description?

That is an inference and exaggeration you made all on your own recognizance. I will, however, append my description to the many leaders of anti-women forces in the world, especially those walking the halls of power and financing politicians while getting tax-exempt status and taking monies from followers to live the personal 'gospel of prosperity' life.

I'm not surprised at all that authoritarian leaders draw trusting followers to them to do their footwork and repeat their mantras. They demand uncritical trust and many people are trained to give that to leaders, especially the religious.

What annoys those authoritarian leaders is that there's a growing proportion of educated populace, evidence and law that is undermining their power base and fearmongering. They're naturally fighting to retain and regain it.

But the 'touchy topic' of bodily autonomy still boils down to this, if (the general 'you' not specific 'you', Doubting Anonymous) you don't want an abortion, don't have one. If you don't want to use contraception, don't use it. If you want to bear a high risk pregnancy or one started by accident, rape or just bad timing, the best of luck to you in your endeavours and let there be support for you to survive and thrive. If you want to support a woman that has made one of those decisions and the consequences thereof, the best of days to you as well.

If you want to control the bodies of women who are not you -- for whatever sincere or lying reason, if you want to deliberately destroy access to support structures in society so as to force each and every woman through circus hoops, physical and psychological stress, shame, censure, poverty, medical crisis, dependency on violent partners, inability to care for already living children, abstinence; if you intellectually decide that half the population is a 'special interest' group that needs a firm hand from rational thinkers informed by Natural Law to know what's best for not-men, and constant punishment and deprivation of autonomy in favour of a glob of cellular development is your happy place...

...that's when you need to unpack all the ingrained prejudice built atop women's backs throughout history and examine presumptions we all are taught from day one about women's inability to be active owners of even their personal lives. We're not talking about somewhat comfortably well-off white women in richer nations. We're talking about all women, of all colours and classes and sexualities. It's still a global meme for men that no matter what else, at least they are not born a woman, that even the lowest social class men should have authority over any woman, because...well, those goalposts squirm out from under refuting evidence and find another BECAUSE to rest on, denying the previous goal meant anything. All too often, the most telling BECAUSE is the LucyVanPelt solution; violence, direct and indirect, individual and societal.

It's very high odds that my saying that will meet immediate denial and accusation of exaggeration, just as Doubting Anonymous fastened on, not the greater message I was putting out about the baseline of progressive alliance being the Charter of Rights and laws founded in that for the dignity and equality of women in society, but DA's inference that my descriptor had meant something I hadn't said, with a return implication to me that I was being irrationally and unfoundedly hyperbolic and hence, dismissed as a poisoned well for the rest of the post.

Now, it's true that having made the descriptor, I'm in the nominal position of proving it with evidence, which leads in a very circular way back to the entire PB foofarah with DJ! How many times a week is evidence provided here at DJ! and other blogs to prove how much lying is being done by authoritarian anti-women leaders and followers? How many times over the centuries, the years, the months, the weeks has the autonomy of women's bodies been 'settled' only to have naysayers trade on prejudice they've profited by and say 'what was that? eh? No, sorry, don't have that memo, tl:dr, was a feminazi source, Is it that time of month for you? That doesn't make common sense, where's your PhD dissertation by no not that one, the other one...-scrapescrapescrapesoundofgoalpostsbeingmoved'.

It's very reminiscent of the argument I suspect 99% of readers around DJ! have been in. Someone loudly proclaims something as fact, you refute it and they, who had produced no evidence for their own declaration and feeling no evidence is needed beyond repeating themselves louder with more emphasis, demand on the spot all the research ever done to prove your countering claim. And in the times when you're pissed off enough to do so, they then declare you heard them wrong and they never meant that, they meant x;x being whatever gets them out of being wrong=ergo rubber/glue.

It's very easy to win arguments when you're using Fizzbin as a rhetorical basis.

So, when faced with the *fact* the Supreme Court (Canada, not the US you wannabee teabaggers) rendered a very clear, sound, legally binding national decision, and we've had decades of anticlimactic OMGAbortionArmageddon!!1!! statistics underpinning its soundness, why are taxpayers, many of whom are women, being faced with a Parliamentary version of that stereotypical loudmouth telling them "Therethere, we're only talking about the humanity of hortonhearsawhohumans, abortion?pishposh! (Does the sombre rational concern strike anyone else as the same whiny tone as 'I'll only put it in a little/pull out before anything happens/you know it doesn't feel the same when I wear one/if you really loved me/what are the odds/I'll be there for you baby/my wife doesn't understand me/I'll pay you extra atop the babysitting fee').

Why? Say it with me - authoritarian, lying, anti-evidence, theocracy-pandering plutocrats who smugly know that whatever prescriptive law exists, exists for the 'little people', which of course, aren't them.

The null hypothesis of the day truly is, I don't need to find proof of lying liars or that women deserve bodily autonomy. The evidence has been presented, proofed, reviewed and settled, ad nauseum. Anyone who wants to prove otherwise has to bring sincere proponents out who do not uncritically rote-repeat lies as fed to them by lying sources but have actual evidence beyond appeals to deities, imagined futures, or taxes 'wasted' on slutty women, why women should be legally dehumanized to the status of criminally stupid incubator of a cellular clump.

And no, the presenter does not deserve a taxpayer funded authority platform to doodlecrap quackery and falsehoods from. I suspect though, that they'll get one, because the Harper government has already shown it doesn't mind spending billions of dollars on a lethally malformed creation that should have been aborted immediately, yet despite the desperate insistence of scientific experts, has gone to great lengths to deliver it stillborn while 'misrepresenting' to the birthing family about its inability to be viable, at crippling costs to everyone involved...but him.

Why would Harper break with a trend? Spinspinspin that platter, doc! This one goes out to him and Woody. The Zombies and ohhhhh those wimminz!

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Alright, I admit that I misunderstood what you were trying to say. I meant no hostility towards you or anyone else here, I was just trying to better understand where you are coming from. I'm sorry for the way I acted, and if their is something I could do to help make things better, I would like to if I could.

DA, if that is you, there is a lot of passion involved in this most basic conflict between the urge to survive and the fear of death all wrapped up in a big messy snarl of sex.

We are talking about lives of existing women vs potentiality. So much talking.

So, basically if you want to help? Don't aid those negotiating away women's rights over their own bodies. It's very simple and yet very scary because so many generations have been invested in doing just that.

Try to support baby-bearing humans and listen to what they must through and the fact they are being rhetorically slapped in the face and denigrated every time they're told having a womb makes them incapable of comprehending the responsibility of being pregnant and must be criminalized so as to stop acting irresponsibly.

If you're a born male, take some time, do thought experiments. Sit down and focus on being told, oh I don't know, that you aren't allowed to have contraception or a vasectomy, but any time you have intervaginal sex and you get a woman pregnant, you've got to carry the embryo in your gut cavity for the rest of the pregnancy.

Read up on what that entails, what will happen to your body. What the risks are, how easy it is for things to go wrong. How you might be blamed as deliberately trying to rid yourself of the pregnancy via non-perfect incubation and how others have gone to prison for that crime.

Imagine going through all that without a willing heart. Being forced to do it against your every desire. Being told you should have kept your trousers zipped if you didn't want to do this. That you have no family support. That the woman involved walked away and you've never seen her since and there's no legal reason for her to be involved.

Now imagine you're 16.

Would you prefer a world where you don't have to carry that fetus unless you have a great and loving desire to see it through? Can you imagine being ordered into having a loving desire or you will be considered a terrible baby killer? Are you content with being told it's only eight months as if nothing could go wrong in the meantime?